Dynamic A-MPDU Adaptation Method for Airtime Fairness in Channel Bonding-Ready WLANs

Abstract

Channel bonding is a technology that increases the transmission rates by bundling and using multiple continuous channels. However, its communication performance decreases over time because of the channel competition caused by nearby wireless LAN devices. Dynamic channel bonding (DCB) is projected to become mainstream based on efficient channel utilization, which can overcome this performance degradation even under severe competitive conditions. However, because the implementation of the DCB in actual hardware products and simulators is still in the preliminary stage, its performance has not been evaluated in detail. The performance of DCB has not been evaluated at the frame level with carrier-sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) functions under diverse channel competition conditions. In this study, we employed a theoretical approach ( $2\times $ M/M/1/K) based on the frame level to evaluate the performance of DCB with the CSMA/CA function. Furthermore, we implemented a channel bonding mechanism in the Scenargie simulator and verified its effectiveness by comparing the simulation results with theoretical results. The simulation results show that the DCB inevitably undergoes performance degradation owing to a performance anomaly caused by airtime unfairness. Therefore, we propose a dynamic A-MPDU adaptation method to achieve airtime fairness among the nearby wireless LANs. The proposed method can maximize throughput performance while achieving airtime fairness.

Keywords

• Airtime fairness
• A-MPDU
• dynamic channel bonding
• Wi-Fi